I don't know if anyone has been able to do this, but I would love to have the new mini live cd work from my USB drive instead of having to carry around a CD. I've used the syslinux method of booting live CD's and changed the directory structure a little(placed the files located in the boot directory at root and changed the config file to match) so that it boots, but I seem to run into a problem where after booting the kernel it does not see the "livecd.squashfs" image. Has anyone been able to get something like this up and running and if so how? And if no one has been able to do this then I think it would be a worthwhile modification.

Wasn't aware of that distribution, but yea I guess I could use that if it came to it. I really like sabayon though, and I can't see it being a big deal to add support for USB booting. I've searched the error that I get when booting ( Could not find CD to boot, something else needed! ) and found something on this page ( http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Gentoo_LiveCD_and_LiveUSB ) but I don't know if this is applicable and I've had trouble edditing the file they describe (which for sabayon would be inside the sabayon.igz archive). I think that a few small modifications to the initilialization script would do it, but I've been unable to get to the script to edit it.

The mini image fits on a 1 GB stick fine, ('ve been trying to get that one working for a number of reasons as opposed to a true install on a flash disk. 1 because I can be assured auto-detection on various systems (I've had issues when installing and swapping from system to system where kudzu didint autoconfig correctly and X wouldent start) also since its setup as a mini-cd its configured as read only, thus elliminating the problems when writing to flash over and over since flash eventually wears out as it is written to. I would be interested in the config file you guys have for the install image tho. Please let me know when you have any betas or anything available for a thumb release.

I recently got the Sabayon 3.2 mini Live edition running on a flash disk, I know some other people have been trying to get this going as well so I thought I'de share with you guys what I did.

Part 1, formatting.

First thing I did was try the standard "Syslinux" method of creating a live distro on a flash disk. Syslinux boots from FAT media so I formated the disk as a fat 32 partition. I did this with a windows utility that formats USB drives, this utility seems to fix problems that can show up trying to boot to flash drives that have been reformatted many times. I found this tool along with other information about live cds on flash memory here...(http://www.beezmo.com/FloobyDustDir/FDK ... pixUsb.htm)
The link for the utility should be

"~~~~~~~~~~~~~~from howudune.com~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
download Syslinux from http://syslinux.zytor.com/index.php. These instructions used syslinux-3.11.zip.
Extract the syslinux files to C:\syslinux-3.11.
Insert you USB Key into a USB slot in your PC and note the drive letter that it is assigned.
Run "C:\syslinux-3.11\win32\syslinux.exe (target drive)" where the target drive is the letter assigned to your USB key. Ex. "C:\syslinux-3.11\win32\syslinux.exe E:"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`"

Part 3, copying the CD over

Next thing I did was to copy the CD over to the root of the flash drive(yes that means I took the files out of boot and isolinux subfolders and moved them to the root of the flash drive as well). After moving the files to the root I had to rename isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg, also edit syslinux.cfg to remove references to the subfolders... here is an example of what mine looks like....
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~syslinux.cfg top couple of lines~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
DEFAULT sabayon
GFXBOOT bootlogo
GFXBOOT-BACKGROUND 0xB63E3A
APPEND root=/dev/ram0 initrd=sabayon.igz unionfs init=/linuxrc cdroot doslowusb looptype=squashfs max_loop=64 loop=/livecd.squashfs splash=silent,theme:sabayon vga=791 CONSOLE=/dev/tty1 quiet --

Now when I boot I have issue where it will boot, but when trying to mount and find the live image it would fail(this is where most people on the forums were stuck). What I did was to edit the initrd.scripts file to make it a little more verbose so I could see why exaclty it was failing. What I noticed is that the mount command that was being issued would fail on fat partitions. Simple solution, setup a second partition that is able to be mounted. I chose ext3, but there may be other formats that work aswell. I booted up a knoppix cd and ran "qtparted". Through qtparted I was able to resize the fat partition to leave about 800 megs free at the end of the disk(the image is only about 700 megs, but since ext3 is a journaled filesystem the same file "image.squashfs" takes more space. I also made sure to set the first partition(the fat partition) to Active(in qtparted right click on the partition and hit set active). After this was completed I copied two files "image.squashfs" and "livecd" over to the ext3 partition.

Part 5, enjoy

After these steps I was able to boot just like from the CD but with quite noticible speed increase. The partition with the image.squashfs(the ext3 partition) is locked, but the fat partition comes up writeable(so becareful what files you modify/delete). When using the flash drive from windows onlly the first partition(the fat partition) will show up and is usable just like any other flash drive. Abut 25 megs is occupied on the fat partition.

cvill64 wrote:we are going to make one that hopefully fits on a 1 gb usb stick sometime soon

If you do let us know (On-Disk.com). We've had a few developers ask us about offering their products on USB sticks as well. So, we've begun planning out a system where a customer can select a drive and the OS they want on it and we'll ship it to them ready to run.

In just 2 more days I'll be able to dedicate all my time to On-Disk and other activities such as sweetcomputeing.com so we'll be able to get to a lot more developmental activities. (in short that means we're finally doing well enough I can quit my day job)